Gallery Details

Photos of the exhibits of the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (National Art Museum of Catalonia our MNAC), Barcelona. Situated on Montjuïc hill at the end of Avinguda de la Reina Maria Cristina, near Pl Espanya. The museum is especially notable for its outstanding collection of romanesque church paintings, and for Catalan art and design from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including modernisme and noucentisme. The Museum is housed in the Palau Nacional, a huge, Italian-style...more »

Photos of the exhibits of the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (National Art Museum of Catalonia our MNAC), Barcelona. Situated on Montjuïc hill at the end of Avinguda de la Reina Maria Cristina, near Pl Espanya. The museum is especially notable for its outstanding collection of romanesque church paintings, and for Catalan art and design from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including modernisme and noucentisme. The Museum is housed in the Palau Nacional, a huge, Italian-style building dating to 1929.

It is one of the most important and outstanding collections in the Museum, due largely to the series of mural paintings it includes. Indeed, the Museu Nacional Romanesque Collection is unmatched by that of any other museum in the world. Many of the works here originally adorned rural churches in the Pyrenees and other sites in Old Catalonia, or Catalunya Vella, as it is known; they began to be discovered and studied in the early 20th century, particularly after a Pyrenean expedition in 1907 by the Institut d'Estudis Catalans (Institute of Catalan Studies), which later published Les pintures murals catalanes (Catalan Mural Paintings). Years later, the news emerged that a group of foreign financiers and antiquarians had block-purchased most of these paintings to be taken to the United States of America. Although there were no laws in Spain at that time to forbid the expatriation of art, the Junta de Museus (Catalan Board of Museums) was able to successfully intervene in order to rescue, dismantle and transfer works to the Museum of Barcelona (1919–1923), then housed in the Parc de la Ciutadella, thus conserving and protecting these Romanesque works, considered a completely unique piece of art heritage and also a symbol of the birth and formation of Catalonia.
The Gothic collection features a considerable number of Catalan works accompanied, moreover, by an extraordinary selection of pieces from the other territories that were once ruled by the Crown of Aragon. As a whole, this section presents a broad, representative panoramic view of Gothic art produced in the three large peninsular territories that formed part of the kingdom of Aragon – Catalonia, Aragon itself, and Valencia – as well as a more anecdotal selection of works from Majorca.
The Gothic rooms display works from the late 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, arranged in chronological order, although the pieces are also grouped by school and typological affinity, and several thematic sections have been established. These include the renowned Mural paintings of the Conquest of Majorca, which preside over the first Gothic room.
Download photos of the Gothic and Romanesque exhibits of the the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya or buy as photo art prints.